Friday: NYC trip III part 2

T.Rex at the Natural History Museum in NYC. This was a great day, the museum was loads of fun and honestly I could have spent a lot more time there. Kate and I sort of breezed through a lot of the cultural exhibits and there were many exhibits we didn't even see. The dinosaur exhibit seemed worthy of some photos. We actually didn't even get to all of this exhibit as there was more skeletons on display in a second floor rotunda that we didn't get to. My favorite parts of the museum was probably the geology and "living planet" section which went into climate change as a function of the planets natural cycles, cataclysmic events, and the influence of man. There were displays on calderas such as Yellowstone which is showing increased activity in the past few years. There was also a timeline associated with an ice core from Antarctica which I was pretty geeked out over. Kate's favorite exhibits were the the hall of minerals, and the Asian culture exhibit.
There were some fossils of dinosaur gizzards which were pretty gosh darned cool too! I like to imagine these giant beasts running around going "Tweet tweet!!"
Here I am chillin with Triceratops. We had a killer lunch in the museum cafe. We both opted for an overpriced slice of cheese pizza. For some reason it tasted really good, but in actuality it was essentially a fancy slice of Elio's pizza, complete with that crust that has tiny holes in the bottom of it. We split a cookie for desert and slugged back our Diet Cokes in the bowels of the museum before fitting in another couple of hours of exhibits.

That evening we headed out to the Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn to see "Three" which was a show put on by an Israeli dance company called the Batsheva Dance Company. It was very ummm... avant garde? It was abstract, incorporating everything from Brian Eno music to the Beach Boys. I read about it when looking for things to do in the evening and thought it would be a pretty unique activity. It was put on by BAM or the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Three was part of the "Next Wave" festival which was supposed to highlight up and coming innovative artists from across the world. The dancers were great, and the compositions were heavy on themes of sexuality and equality in a chaotic world..... or at least that's what I got from it. I'm far from being an expert on interpreting modern dance. I was amused by the introductions of each part of the show by a man holding a computer monitor. He walked out on stage with it, and turned the monitor on while holding it over his stomach. On the screen appeared his face which proceeded to tell us the contents of the next act in broken "Max Headroom" style English.

The show definitely turned out to be a little more "shock theater" than I anticipated. Kate described it as though they were "trying too hard" to be different or controversial. This culminated when several of the dancers mooned us, and others eventually dropped their trousers to give us a brief glimpse of the frontal regions where the sun don't shine. While we were a little weirded out by this... it was generally a unique and enjoyable experience. I'm not sure we'd pick modern dance again however.... if we do we'll have to find some dumbed down Disney-fied version perhaps.